Voltron meets Godzilla in a Rocky/Transformers slug-fest

Rating: 7/10 (12 July 2013)

I saw trailers before and was hopeful.
What I got was a knock-down awesome robot vs. monster movie. I wasn't looking for the next Transformers (though I really liked the first one, less with the dogs and teenage awkwardness and more with the robots), I wasn't looking for a Coppola/North best written screenplay like "Patton", I wasn't looking for a dramatic Oscar-winning performance of "English Patient" (which I fell-asleep in a few times because of boredom) I wasn't expecting great cinematography or musical score...but the graphics, CGI and music turned out to be effective and quite good.
If you went (or will go) expecting the next cinematic masterpiece like "Dances with Wolves", or a classically written and well acted "Casablanca" you're going for the wrong reasons. This is Die Hard (1, not 5...5 was a disgrace to the Die Hard name), this is Rocky (again 1, or 2), this movie is a little Real Steel with more fighting, and monsters, but without all the cheesy crap.
It was awesome! Thrilling and just a great remake (and a better make) of movie combo: classic cartoons and monster movies. If this movie had come out when I was a boy, 20 odd years ago, I probably would have seen it 10 times at the theater, bought the movie and then watched it at least once-a-week till I wore out the tape. It's not the wussy Power Ranger crap.
The things I liked: Robots, monsters, robots and monsters fighting, technology. Big machines, big machine sounds. Big cool robots and big cool robot sounds smashing big gruesome, maniacal alien monsters hell-bent on destruction.
****** Spoiler Alert ****** The plot, simple? Yes very. Often predictable outcomes. The acting was average. The writing didn't help the average acting.
I saw it in a foreign country so I'm not sure if the audio was goofed but when Mako meets Raleigh her lips were speaking Japanese but audio was English and he answered in-kind and the only subtitles I got were in the foreign language (not Japanese or English). I don't know if that was intentional, you know the old Samurai movies where the actors were speaking Japanese but audio was English voice-overs. If so now that I think about it, it could be pretty funny.
Please stop with all the "Battle Speeches" Idris did a great job in the movie overall but those last-stand battle speeches were finished in Braveheart (yes that was 1995).
But I loved the Voltron-esque (or that era of genre robot movies) and Godzilla-esque references.